Controller design for small air vehicles — An overview and comparison

Abstract

Small unmanned air vehicles (SUAVs) such as quadrotors are mainly used in several research labs including our Multiple Air Robotics Indoor Testbed (MARIT) [1]. However, an overview of these common control techniques have been missing. This paper presents an overviews of designing and evaluating commonly used controllers for SUAVs. To design the controllers, the quadrotor's physical parameters are measured and mathematical dynamics models are established. Simulators are constructed based on the dynamics models to validate the performances of the controllers. Several evaluation criteria are used to compare the performances and the results are presented.